“THE END” IS “ONCE UPON A TIME”

     “All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.” This opening for Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet In Heaven is as classic an opening as Charles Dickens’ “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” or Herman Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” (or even CS Lewis’ “There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and it almost deserved it”). I have a scrap of paper in my personal treasury on which is written Mitch Albom’s words—perhaps the last thing my Mother ever wrote before she died. And I pray hers is now a glorious beginning.

Historian Marvin O’Connell wrote a wonderfully researched and well written narrative of the 19^th century Oxford Tractarian Movement, led by John Henry Newman, at the time a Fellow of Oriel College and Vicar of St Mary the Virgin, the University church. In his fervor to restore sacramental integrity to the Church of England, he came to question his own grounds, and he had to deal with tremendous opposition from many others in the Anglican communion who wanted nothing to do with sacramentalism. Ultimately, of course, Newman resigned as an Anglican priest and became the Catholic whom we now know as Cardinal Newman (a canonized saint, and hopefully very soon a Doctor of the Church). The last chapter of O’Connell’s book was “An End and a Beginning.”

We have just celebrated the Solemnity of Jesus Christ the King of the Universe. The Sundays leading up to this culmination of our liturgical year were filled with parables about the End—encouraging us to think about our own mortality and the direction of our lives’ choices: wise or foolish virgins; sheep or goats. Yet the first Sunday of Advent is still filled with readings about our need for repentance (“Lord, make us turn to you…” “Be watchful! Be alert!”). Why?

I think the bottom line is that ends and beginnings are with us on an ongoing basis. Our Christian sense of history is linear—it began, it is moving forward, and it has a goal or End. Yet our liturgy takes us in cyclic motion, to remind us there is no place, just yet, for the complacency of thinking we have “made it.” Every celebration of the glory of our King is followed by the season of waiting and preparation; every Birth takes us to the desert of Lenten penance; the Resurrection takes us to “Ordinary Time,” where we live our daily lives of prayer and active love. It is this life (what I call “Remote Preparation”) that sets us, finally, in the group of sheep or goats, and our end will surely be another beginning (for better or for worse). Which will it be? We are, of course, saved by grace through faith, but only if we say (and live out) our YES to our Lord.   What kind of response do we want to make (what kind of response are we making) to His grace? What kind of beginning are we longing for our end, here, to be? The grace and power are His; the choice to accept or reject it is ours. Let’s stay awake; let’s be prepared. Happy Advent!

FOOTNOTE: For those who enjoyed The Five People, I strongly encourage you to check out Mitch Albom’s The Next Person You Meet In Heaven. It’s a long way of saying “All things work to the good for those who love God”—Romans 8:28).                                              -Fr. David